Students are starving. One man could fix it with a keystroke

On Wednesday afternoon, a long line of students at Western Sydney University queued for free food. I mean, that’s a disgrace right there. We’ve got young people who can’t afford to feed themselves while doing their very best to improve their lives.

Western Sydney isn’t the first to feed its students, and it won’t be the last if Labor doesn’t sort itself out promptly. (Look, not the worst government we’ve ever had but definitely the most disappointing, am I right?)

Before the students arrived....Credit: Western Pantry

Western Pantry opened last week on the university’s Kingswood campus. Rice, oats, instant noodles, milk, and trying to meet a demand for fresh fruit and vegetables. This week, the queue is 10 per cent longer than last week. Imagine the demand once Instagram-word gets around.

It’s a brilliant idea from the university, and the perfect time for its newly minted vice chancellor George Williams to come out swinging. He told the Herald’s Daniella White students were dropping out of arts degrees because the cost was killing them. The cost is now approaching 50 grand. 50 grand! A foolish Coalition decision not yet overturned by the Labor government. “They are rightly fearful of having a debt until death because they are unable to ever properly repay it,” Williams said.

Word, as the young people say.

In 2020, the now chair of the Productivity Commission, the amazingly calm Danielle Wood, then chief executive of the Grattan Institute, described the Job-ready Graduates package as one of the worst-designed policies she had ever seen. The University of Sydney’s vice chancellor Mark Scott has argued against the policy ever since the last lot proposed it. He says it must be unpicked “as a matter of urgency”.

Now we see its terrible consequences. If I had imagined a way in which the Coalition would seek to polarise, seek to punish those who want to get ahead despite hurdles, seek to keep people in their place, that package would be perfectly designed. Williams says these fees are targeting subjects which constitute degrees of choice for low socioeconomic status students, for Indigenous people, for women.

“I want it to be fixed right now,” Williams says. The system is broken, it doesn’t really influence student choice and students end up with mountains of debt. “We need a back-to-basics approach about what we charge students,” he adds.

That could happen with a single keystroke, says Andrew Norton, professor of higher education at the Australian National University. “There should be an immediate ad hoc reduction in subject prices for humanities and social sciences.”

Jason Clare’s team, take note.

Norton says it will barely cost the government anything (the number of these students is in decline) and even those who remain may never earn enough to repay the debt. A reminder, any time you ever want to borrow money, lenders look at debts, including the wildly escalating HECS debts. Is the government consigning these people, young and old, to a lifetime of never having enough? What a terrible legacy for a Labor government.

If you are a parent (or, ahem, bossy grandparent) and you have any influence at all on the next generations, tell them this. Do not do an arts degree – at least not until the federal government fixes its fee problem. The bloke who swept to power on the vibes of growing up in housing commission with a single mum on a disability pension is doing next to nothing to propel young people upwards and onwards (don’t get me started on housing). And sure, I always give people the advice to take a gap year. But I’ve never before asked people to avoid a particular kind of degree.

I loved my arts degree which I completed last century. I taught in a communications degree for more than a decade. These are, excuse my pretensions, sites of contention and invention. Places to have arguments, learn to write well and maybe even make some lifelong friends – or even, in my case, a husband. But I’m not sure how much of that is going on any more. And no matter where you go, it is not worth a lifelong crushing debt, now with added indexation.

Why is this happening? Honestly, I spent a decade complaining about the education policies of the Coalition and was swept up in the whole equity vibe of Labor’s campaign. Instead, it has resolutely held on to the very policies of its much-maligned predecessors, even though Clare knows they have failed. Yes, he proudly wields his record of adopting 29 of the 47 recommendations of the Universities Accord. And yes, it’s great we will now have hubs which will mean rural, regional, outer metropolitan and peri-urban students will have better access to participation. But I’m betting those kids – many of whom have to work pretty much full-time while they study – will struggle.

Struggle. A concept I would have thought Anthony Albanese was all over. It would be good if he and Jason Clare could fix these problems before his government is all over.

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.